The pros may be elbow deep in the Vuelta, with Worlds and a handful of other big fall races still to come, but for us NW amateurs, road season is very nearly over. You can tell it’s that time of year when, instead of focusing on maintaining a set of perfectly crisp tan lines, at least half of your concentration on a given ride is spent avoiding banana slugs on the road. Those massive pseudopods, scattered about on every shady, damp patch of asphalt they can find, usher out the season of skinny tires, and tow in the season of 32mm tubulars, gliding on a shimmering slick of hygroscopic mucus. (more…)

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Here at the Vanilla Workshop, we have a very complex QC process from Coat that entails a large piece of, wide, white masking tape being stuck to the inside of the bottom bracket with the owners name scribbled on it. Thankfully though, we have a very creative and talented paint staff who go the extra mile to ensure that each tear of QC tape, gets the special treatment it deserves.

These are some of our recent favorites:

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Stuck in a headwind in every direction today. How does that happen? Anyway… pounding in long hours on the bike in preperation to ride down the coast of California with some friends. Looking at some 130plus miles days on the bike with this sort of crit rider sprunty body and two months to get it together. Not sexy. So thankful for tall friends in headwinds.

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Plans. Why bother, am I right? These past few weeks I kind of lost sight of my general racing outlook, and I tried to control far too much through careful planning. I gave up drinking in my hunt for good sleep. I did some real, genuinely structured workouts. I obeyed my scheduled easy days and recovery methods. Hell, I even sat out the Twilight Crit because I thought the likelihood that I’d end up hurt for my target race was too great. And then the day after, Saturday, when the state championship crit was all wrapped up and in the books, where was I? On the ground, making sure my shoulder wasn’t re-broken and my bike was still safe to ride. (more…)

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You may not be aware of this, but for as much as we here at The Vanilla Workshop are passionate about bikes… we also kinda really love soccer. In fact, little known detail is that Speedvagen actually has a futsal team that plays in a local league and many bike frames are built around conversation regarding team tactics. That, and we have folks here in the shop that play in other soccer leagues throughout the area, people that were recruited to play collegiate soccer, and people whose children loved attending futsal camp over the summer.

a common lunch time sight at the shop...

So, it’s not that surprising that during these Olympics, we’ve been a little fanatic about the US Women’s Soccer team. Thankfully all of their weekday games have taken place during shop hours so instead of rocking out to Kenny Loggins (as we usually do), we’ve been streaming the game and multitasking – ie: measuring your seat stays to the sounds of GOOOOOOOOOOAL (please note… we always double check our measurements after exciting plays happen).

Also, it just so happens that one of our favorite USA players, Megan Rapinoe, went to college right here at the University of Portland. Recently Nike featured Megan in their “Always On” segment and in the midst of all the yoga, coffee, soccer playing, music and general “Portlandesque things” in the video, Megan also spends some QT with one of our favorite Vanillas.

Anyways, we want to take this opportunity to wish Megan Rapinoe and the rest of the US Women good luck in their Gold Medal match against Japan which is happening today. We’re all pulling for you here at the shop!

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It’s been a busy past week or so here at the Vanilla Workshop… not only are in the midst of getting our 2012 SVCX Machines out the door, taking orders for the 2103 SV Road run, and starting on a new Vanilla, but we’ve also had some very big life events going on!

Birger (Coat) got married last weekend and just this past week, long time shop employee Scott left us after six amazing years to become a Dad! (Scott ended up welcoming a new baby daughter into the world last Friday.)

Congrats to Birger and Scott and their new families!

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Jeff Curtes has been a friend of the shop for years and years. We’ve built him Speedvagen Cross and Road Machines and he has my old SS Vanilla cross bike (a bike that I still love, btw and want to make a million (probably a hundred)more of).